Techniques for Interaction with a Guest Virtual Machine

1. A method for interaction with a guest virtual machine comprising: monitoring, on a physical platform hosting a virtualization environment, at least one image load into electronic memory of a guest virtual machine (GVM) using a secure virtual machine (SVM), wherein the GVM and the SVM run on a hypervisor of the virtualization environment and the SVM is a management component of the virtualization environment, the monitoring comprising scanning exported data structures in the loaded image; identifying, by the SVM, one or more tagged control blocks in the scanned data structures, wherein a tagged control block comprises a data structure which follows a predefined naming convention specific to the SVM and which contains data meant for the SVM to consume and/or populate in order to implement a tagged memory communication scheme between the GVM and the SVM; and performing, using the SVM, at least: reading one or more portions of the identified tagged control blocks; and setting a value in one or more of the identified tagged control blocks.

2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the image load comprises at least one of: a load of an executable file and a load of a dynamic link library.

3. The method of claim 1 , further comprising: identifying a handler to handle one or more of the identified tagged control blocks based at least in part on a portion of data in the identified tagged control blocks.

4. The method of claim 3 , wherein the portion of data in the identified tagged control block further comprises a header portion including at least one of: version data indicating a particular version of inter-virtual machine communication syntax; a type string indicating a type of inter-virtual machine communication; and length data indicating a length of the communication data.

5. The method of claim 1 , further comprising: reading the value set in the one or more of the identified tagged control blocks using the GVM; and performing at least one action in response to reading the value.

6. The method of claim 1 , further comprising: monitoring one or more platform environment attributes of the physical platform using the SVM.

7. The method of claim 6 , wherein the one or more platform environment attributes comprise at least one of: CPU utilization, memory utilization; network utilization; and storage utilization.

8. The method of claim 6 , further comprising: determining that the one or more platform environment attributes exceed a specified threshold; identifying a GVM process for which resource consumption will be reduced; setting a value in an identified tagged control block corresponding to the identified GVM process; reading the value set in the identified tagged control block corresponding to the identified GVM process using the GVM; and performing at least one action by the GVM in response to reading the value set in the identified tagged control block to reduce resource consumption by the identified GVM process.

9. The method of claim 8 , wherein the value set in the identified tagged control block comprises a setting indicating a configurable throttle value to the identified GVM process, the configurable throttle value causing the identified GVM process to reduce usage of CPU resources proportionate to the configurable throttle value.

10. The method of claim 8 , wherein the GVM process comprises at least one of a virus scanning process, an antivirus update process, a data backup process, and a data restoration process.

11. The method of claim 8 , wherein identifying a GVM process for which resource consumption will be reduced comprises using GVM process information provided via the tagged memory communication scheme to the SVM.

12. The method of claim 1 , wherein monitoring the at least one image load into electronic memory of a GVM using a SVM comprises detecting loading of a process known by the SVM to implement the tagged memory communication scheme.

13. The method of claim 1 , wherein reading one or more portions of the identified tagged control blocks comprises reading exported GVM process information.

14. The method of claim 13 , wherein the exported GVM process information comprises a current number of copies of a particular process running on the GVM.

15. An article of manufacture for interaction with a guest virtual machine, the article of manufacture comprising: at least one non-transitory processor readable medium; and instructions stored on the at least one medium; wherein the instructions are configured to be readable from the at least one medium by at least one processor and thereby cause the at least one processor to operate so as to: monitor, on a physical platform hosting a virtualization environment, at least one image load into electronic memory of a guest virtual machine (GVM) using a secure virtual machine (SVM), wherein the GVM and the SVM run on a hypervisor of the virtualization environment and the SVM is a management component of the virtualization environment, the monitoring comprising scanning exported data structures in the loaded image; identify, by the SVM, one or more tagged control blocks in the scanned data structures, wherein a tagged control block comprises a data structure which follows a predefined naming convention specific to the SVM and which contains data meant for the SVM to consume and/or populate in order to implement a tagged memory communication scheme between the GVM and the SVM; and perform, using the SVM, at least: reading one or more portions of the identified tagged control blocks; and setting a value in one or more of the identified tagged control blocks.

16. A system hosting a virtualization environment and for interaction with a guest virtual machine comprising: one or more processors communicatively coupled to a network; wherein the one or more processors are configured to: monitor at least one image load into electronic memory of a guest virtual machine (GVM) using a secure virtual machine (SVM), wherein the GVM and the SVM run on a hypervisor of the virtualization environment and the SVM is a management component of the virtualization environment, the monitoring comprising scanning exported data structures in the loaded image; identify, by the SVM, one or more tagged control blocks in the scanned data structures, wherein a tagged control block comprises a data structure which follows a predefined naming convention specific to the SVM and which contains data meant for the SVM to consume and/or populate in order to implement a tagged memory communication scheme between the GVM and the SVM; and perform, using the SVM, at least: reading one or more portions of the identified tagged control blocks; and setting a value in one or more of the identified tagged control blocks.

17. The system of claim 16 , wherein the one or more processors are further configured to: read the value set in the one or more of the identified tagged control blocks using the GVM; and perform at least one action by the GVM in response to reading the value.